Editorial: Rallying Social Text

This issue of Social Text marks a turn in the journal's history. Several years into our third decade of publication, a great deal has changed in the surrounding intellectual and political climate. Of course, the editorship of the journal itself and the membership of the Social Text Collective have also shifted drastically, to the degree that recent conversations among the collective have reconsidered the trajectory of the journal's run in order to review and rethink the mission and goals of Social Text as a venue for engaged criticism.

The journal was founded in 1979 with the subtitle "Theory, Culture, Ideology," a trinity of terms whose relation to politics and economics was articulated by a discourse of Marxism. The original editors, Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, and Fredric Jameson, announced in their initial prospectus that "the framework of the journal is Marxist in the broadest sense of the term." Contending that the political conjuncture had at that time demonstrated the "bankruptcy of liberalism as the dominant ideology of the Western countries," they sensed a need for "a new journal devoted to problems in theory, particularly in the area of culture and ideological practices." For Social Text, they stress, "the dialectical framework of the Marxian tradition is the only one in which these issues can be adequately raised and discussed." ¹ In this opening formulation, an insistence that the "journal's mission is to develop and keep open a distinctively Marxist problematic" is combined with a call for interdisciplinarity in scholarship—a forum that would look for the means and modes of dialogues between critical discourses as various as semiotics, Habermasian critical pragmatics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian analysis, deconstruction, structuralism, and Chomskyian linguistics. "Our position," the editors note,

is that the valuable interpretive and theoretical work done in these various schools or traditions is often accompanied by a strategic containment or delimitation of the field being interrogated. This strategy of containment, however different it may be in each case, generally takes the form of suppressing or repressing history and historical perspective. It is this which the Marxist framework seeks to restore. For us, the vitality of dialectical thinking lies in its power to re-historicize methods and positions and resituate them in the immense life history of human society.

Interestingly, this explicit call for historicization was to some degree overshadowed as Social Text came to be identified with a growing "import" into the U.S. academy of methodologies associated with cultural studies, extending the work developed in England at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. ² Early cultural studies was in many ways an attempt to come to terms with certain problems and blind spots in the Marxist tradition, and indeed to historicize Marxism itself. In practicing a study "from below" of cultural forms and circuits, this work strove in particular to flesh out a complex and critical understanding of the people—that is, the subject of history, that rational motor of world-historical transformation that was too often taken for granted in traditional Marxist discourse. To make history, labor would have to make itself, and the ways and means of doing so would take up practices, modes of expression, that jostled uneasily with the market and appropriated market transactions for other than material gain. Engaged interdisciplinary social criticism would have to get much closer to its subject if it was to avoid simply declaring the downtrodden to be the winners of the epic struggle or dismissing those same souls as hopelessly captured by the evils of banality and misère. The "popular" would become a field of contingency that would have to be analyzed in its smallest details in order to unearth the resources for a different kind of value and to identify the impetus of transformation, or what Stuart Hall once termed "the imaginative resistances of people who have to live within capitalism—the growing points of social discontent, the projections of deeply-felt needs." ³

Cultural studies afforded Marxism a dialogue with its own difference...